Books by Gary Graybill

Monday, June 27, 2011

I’m Just Saying….

One of my true favorites, Actor Peter Falk, who rose to fame on a awkward manner and a rumpled raincoat as the TV detective Lt. Columbo, has died. He was 83. Falk died peacefully at his Beverly Hills home Thursday evening. The cause of death was not released. Though he was a renowned movie and stage actor -- he earned two Oscar nominations in the early '60s and won an Obie (an off-Broadway honor) for his performance in Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" -- he is best remembered for the polite, raincoat-wearing, Peugeot-driving Los Angeles police detective who always wanted to know "just one more thing."

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With the price of gold at record highs, presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul wants to make sure the U.S. gold bars at Fort Knox are really there. Paul called a congressional hearing Thursday to grill federal officials about his bill to audit and inventory all of the gold reserves at Fort Knox, Ky., West Point, N.Y., and Denver, even though Treasury officials insist that the gold is audited annually and is all there.

During the hearing, Paul suggested that the Federal Reserve of New York, which has 5% of the U.S. gold reserves, has the ability to secretly sell or swap gold with other countries without anyone knowing. "The Fed is pretty secret, you know," said Paul, who leans Libertarian. "Congress doesn't have much say on what's going on over there. They do a lot of hiding."

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US and NATO troops are not the only ones the Taliban shoots at, it also attacks itself. At least 15 Islamist militants have been killed in a shootout between the supporters of two Pakistani Taliban commanders near the Afghan border. Several insurgents were also wounded during a gunbattle in the Orakzai tribal region. It was unclear what sparked the shootout.

However, such clashes are common in Orakzai where an unspecified number of insurgents and their commanders have been hiding after fleeing a military operation in nearby regions in recent years.

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Hypocrisy is still alive in Iran. Iran's supreme leader on Saturday accused the United States of supporting terrorism, pointing to American drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

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Here is a great YouTube clip of s shark jumping over some surfers. If that happened to me I would not have needed the surf board to get back the the beach,,,,